The photos tell a different story. The new cubicles reduce noise from the corridor but still provide line of sight between employees (ie, no privacy benefits).
I'm pretty sure it's not about privacy but productivity. Cubicles are probably there to isolate sound and visual distractions. Line of sight emulates body doubling and accountability buddies.
I don't have strong opinion on the lack of privacy. I've been body doubling full-time in work for the last few years and I never felt need for more privacy. I can always go somewhere else if I need to take a break. However, ymmv.
OK, this is something else. Tests for an actual 1980s/90s cubicle: when you focus on your work, is anyone else in your field of view? Can you scoot your chair from your computer to a work desk for writing and reading, with say a bookshelf over it? If you stand up, are you in the field of view of a neighbor? Is it reasonably comfy for a coworker to visit you in your cubicle, maybe sitting down for some pair programming or reviewing some papers together?
Man, in the 80s we thought of cubicles as the cheapass option. I never did have an office.
Hope it will slowly percolate down to other companies which copied this shitty work culture while not providing any other benefits that the FAANG provided.
This is exactly what happens when lack of scientific literature and manager hubris collide together.
After decades and decades there are still no conclusive results about how different types of workplaces influence productivity and mental health, but even if there were manager would not even look at them and instead make decisions based on perceived productivity and "common sense".
Agreed, it's not something a scientific paper would give any useful insight for.
A survey of company success (measured in profits, or market cap) vs office layout, trying to see if there is correlation would be more useful. Even accounting for the fact that there is a lot of cargo culting, and unhappy employees.
Would be useful to get some data, I agree. Cubicles are soul sucking, inhuman environments. Open plan is distracting. Remote work is socially isolating.
> After decades and decades there are still no conclusive results about how different types of workplaces influence productivity and mental health,
No idea about the latter, though I'm much happier having removed a 3 hour round-trip train commute (will it turn up on time? will it even turn up? will it be delayed en route?), but as far as productivity is concerned, my previous employer, like others went fully remote during COVID, and then stayed that way, based on internal evidence.
For all development teams across the company (green field, existing, maintenance, whatever), the number of PRs almost doubled for each team, and slightly less tangible metrics such as down-time, bug reports, decreased by non-trivial amounts, and quite a few product milestones were hit early, by quite some margin. That on its own was statistically significant, as pre-COVID, I don't think they hit any milestone dates.
Of course, you can argue that all of those are due to less meetings, less interruptions, easier availability of people to diagnose problems, and perhaps even better planning is required for being remote, but ultimately, all of those have improved the productivity of my former employer.
I've visited a couple of cubicle farms in the US and spent a couple of weeks in a place in Sweden where everyone had a completely separate office. For me, workplaces are more depressing the more people are walled off from each other.
I get that some people prefer to be alone, but these days why not work remotely?
Leave your walls, collaborate in the collaboration areas, care less about how loud you're being when you get animated about something you're enjoying working on or your new ideas; because you're not killing the focus of the people in their focus areas.
Good work requires variation, collaboration and focus. So, for me how it sounds when you say this is: "people who are given the capability to focus really bum me out"
That's a rather uncharitable way to interpret it. I've merely stated my own preferences, not judged others for theirs. Why would you think it's the fact that others are being given the capability to focus that bums me out like some sort of grinch, rather than (as is the case) that I don't like being physically blocked from interaction with the people around me?
As for the requirements of "good work", those vary with the nature of the job. One of the reasons I've always worked in an open plan office, aside from them being much more common in the UK, is that I work in finance, often on or close to trading floors. That's not an environment that benefits from cubicles and I believe they're rare in this industry in the US too.
But mainly, it's what I'm used to and what I like. I never said you had to feel the same.
The only thing that would be more in tune for a HN comment would be someone saying “if someone ever forces me to switch to a modern ide from eMacs I’ll quit immediately.”
Cube farms FTW. You can get over-the-wall collaboration on occasion without the visual distraction and the cubicle walls help dampen noise/conversation from further away.
It's not as good as a closed office for heads down work, but it's a 100x improvement over open offices where you see every movement, hear every sound, and perpetually feel like you're on display.
Open offices are there to save money because you can pack more people into them than cubicles. Cubicles are there to save money because you can pack more people into them than offices.
If you like open offices, you'll love when they switch you to hoteling so you have no permanent desk, but still need to come into the office!
>If you like open offices, you'll love when they switch you to hoteling so you have no permanent desk, but still need to come into the office!
One does not imply the other. I also prefer open office over cubicle. But not having a permanent desk could be done in a cubicle farm as well. It's an orthogonal dimension of corporate hell.
They're all cost-cutting measures. It's a tradeoff between what the owners are willing to pay for the physical plant vs. what they think they can force down our throats without people walking out the door.
It's the same axis when you look at it as "how do I fit X developers a space that costs Y dollars, and I'm trying to minimize Y."
IMO the best would be cubicles with a roof and door behind you, i.e. fully sealable for sound proofing and isolation when you need to concentrate, but you can open the door when you need to collaborate.
No idea why nobody does this. Japan has been offering these kind of sealed workspaces in manga cafes and "private video watching booths" for decades.
One thing to keep in mind with offices vs. cubes it that, any place I've ever worked, the very strong norm was to have an open door policy. Of course, office door could be shut if you were having a sensitive discussion and maybe now and then if you were really heads-down on deadline. But it would have been seen as basically weird and antisocial to routinely come in and shut your door every day. I don't think I ever knew a single person who did that.
I don’t think office vs. cube is really a debate - most people that like cubes would prefer an office if they had a choice. It’s just that offices for everyone would be prohibitively expensive (for most companies), and probably not even possible in the floorplans of most commercial office spaces.
Offices tend to be bigger if nothing else and you don't need to find somewhere to have a sensitive conversation. I just think you have people here imagining that if they had an office they'd come in and just shut their door all day--which hasn't been the reality anywhere I've ever worked.
Fair enough. I quit an otherwise excellent job because they had an open office layout. I simply found it impossible to work effectively there, and it made me a nervous wreck.
>Facebook was paying a 40 – 50% premium for talent because people didn’t want to work under those conditions
You can mitigate some of the noise with a good pair of noise cancelling headphones. There are far more fundamental reasons for them paying that premium.
I have yet to experience noise cancelling headphones that actually cancel all sounds like people talking. So far it only seems to work for low frequency background noise.
I got some airpods pro for their supposedly great ANC and was really disappointed in how limited it actually was.
FWIW, this is what they now sometimes use at esports events: https://www.acezone.io/ They need to be able to block speech so the players don't hear the commentators. I saw a video where they claimed that before there where specialized gaming noise canceling headphones they used headphones for helicopter pilots because anything else didn't have strong enough noise cancelling.
> You can mitigate some of the noise with a good pair of noise cancelling headphones.
For me, headphones make an open office setup worse, not better. It's not mostly about the noise for me as much as it's about motion. When I wear headphones, I am more "on alert" because I can't tell if people are behind me or not.
I remember reading somewhere that this whole open office space started with startups that couldn't afford cubicles. And because startups were doing it, it became trendy and everyone copied it.
Cant remember where I read it, but I have no problem believing it.
It became popular because Startups need a lot more collaboration and it’s thought that open offices lead to more collaboration.
When the startups became huge and successful, they didn’t go back to cubicles because the open office was what they used when they were having business success.
Then all the other companies started copying them because they think it will lead them to be more innovative like the startups.
> It became popular because Startups need a lot more collaboration and it’s thought that open offices lead to more collaboration.
Serious question, how would we measure that, and is there any empirical evidence for the idea startups "need" more? I imagine a lot of it is an immediate workaround for a system nobody wants to bother building, like a mailing list or design-specs.
as with many of these "haha tech nerds are rediscovering old things" comments, my instinctive response is:
yes, it is Good Actually that we are continually questioning and testing received wisdom. If we end up reinventing old things from first principles, that means we have all the more confidence in them, rather than relying on the unalive momentum of tradition and path dependence.
people who sneer at reinvention can be too smug sometimes. we owe all progress to the unreasonable men and women who are too arrogant to do anything but poke and prod at life on their own terms.
> yes, it is Good Actually that we are continually questioning and testing received wisdom.
Or you know, alternatively you could understand where the wisdom comes from instead of being clueless about it and think that one can make things better with a snap of fingers.
The part to sneer at is Meta's refusal to call it a cubicle, instead trying to brand it as an innovation. They could say "You know what, we were wrong, cubicles aren't so bad after all."
Sometimes. Other times (most times?) it seems like a kind of reactionary contrarian arrogance that people who have done/studied/experienced X surely have no idea what they are talking about and be dismissed by anyone who has experience with computers.
Progress in science as I understand is only on the shoulders of giants (previous research), not starting over from first principles with every generation. If we did that we'd get nowhere, each generation would get to the wheel or so and then the next one would start over.
I don't think gp is talking about continuous refinement of ideas, which I get the sense is more what you meant. Spending time and energy reinventing cubicles again and again every 10 or so years seems best to avoid, in my opinion.
It's not the "question received wisdom", it's the utterly vapid and self-assuredness of their own damn smarts that is irritating.
Next up: "Should we bother wiping our asses? Hot startup DirtyButt claims to save you 30-45 seconds per day. 'If you think about it, going #2 is one of the grossest experiences people go through in their daily lives,' says Teyron Flanders, founder of DirtyButt. 'I bet I've spent more than several hours of my life putting my hands dangerously close to human waste. That's something I'd rather never do.' Now an A-list unicorn valued at more than seven hundred billion dollars, the startup offers no-wipe bootcamps, a double-thick underwear prototype, and organic options. 'What we're really giving people is freedom. Remember the run on toilet paper from pandemic times? We're going to relegate that dark chapter to the ash heap of history.'"
> What we're really giving people is freedom. Remember the run on toilet paper from pandemic times? We're going to relegate that dark chapter to the ash heap of history.
At the risk of being accused of missing your point: you owe it to yourself to try a nice built in bidet. Many people who try it don’t want to go back to paper alone.
Except you really shouldn’t be wiping your ass. It’s a barbaric practice best left to emergencies or outdoor hiking or something. The use of a bidet is the only civilized way.
It’s only good if the “questioning received wisdom” actually involves questioning it. Not throwing it out and insisting that your idea is better, with zero evidence or even plausibility, for decades.
More reconfigurable softer spaces is exciting to me. Cubicles are hard & fixed infrastructure. Having more dynamic use of space invigorates me, helps me escape a feeling of being trapped by routine.
The focus on sound absorbing material seems also extremely compelling. Sound dampening can have enormous impact & I can imagine some of these partitions doing a lot (ideally with the help of some more room treatment) to make the space pleasant.
I worked at a large company which had a mix between open plan desks and cubicles, and teams would take a cluster of nearby "semicles".
I think that arrangement is a good balance between being able to put your headphones on and focus on your work with a bit of privacy, but also being able to turn your chair around and brainstorm things or quickly chat to an architect, etc.
I feel like there would be a lot less push back against returning to the office, if offices still had actual individual offices. People have realised how unpleasant working in open plan warehouses is.
Is 2x really the case? I got a feeling the number is way lower, maybe 10% - 20% space savings for open plans, compared to if you make people share offices.
Also the need for meeting rooms is lower with offices.
I worked in a company with 2-3 person offices. And I think 2 persons was the best. You could stick two people together that needed to cooperate a lot anyway, or a senior with a (very) junior.
We practically never needed meeting rooms, except for team/project meetings, because whenerver 2 -4 people needed to discuss something they just met up in one of their offices.
2-3 person offices require actually less space than open plan + meeting rooms. That's because you don't need separate rooms for small meetings. Only the couple big ones.
I don't buy that at all. A reasonable sized cubicle has a wide desk and space to move you chair in and out of, plus a 'corridor' between all the cubicles. Change cubicle walls to office walls and have doors open into the existing corridor, and it's no different in size. Building codes might require some changes but I don't think it will be as much as 2x.
The literature (Spolsky lists it one of his articles) implies that increased productivity of the existing employees in their own offices more than compensates for the slight decrease in the number of people you can pack into a fixed area.
That's only for those that life far from the office.
Which, if I'm to believe "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel¹ is common in the US due to broken city planning.
But really not in most of Europe. My cycle to an office is 20 minutes. And in the Netherlands that is considered a long cycling journey.
Europe has it's car infested traffic jams too, don't get me wrong. But many of those stuck in those jams could choose to work close to home, or live close to offices. Houses and offices most often are intermixed in European (and often asian) cities.
Come on now. Many people in the Netherlands live in one city and work in another. Cost of living prohibits most people from living right next to where they work.
I do that 10 minute bike ride.. to the train station.. then I take the train 1h in each direction three times a week and consider myself lucky for not having to do it every day. The trains are packed.
Don't get me wrong, I think the situation with public transport is vastly better in (western) Europe compared to North America, for a variety of reasons, a major one being that especially in NL almost every street has a double-laned bike path next to it. It really does make a difference to have that infrastructure in place, because people use it and this has major lifestyle and health benefits.
But a claim that some majority of people can just bike 10 or 20 minutes to the office was just a bit wild considering my experience living here in NL and taking the train so often. Having said that, it is true that I can bike anywhere in the city I live in within half an hour, and I don't own a car because I can get anywhere by bike or train. The fact that I can do these things allows me to work in another city, instead of being bound to live in a certain restricted location, without even owning a car.
But many people do drive, don't be confused. There are times when it would be really convenient to use a car, and I would be using a car sharing service if it weren't for the fact that my license is not valid here and I need to pass tests which is a long process.
Yeah, but it's still a universal problem in high paying tech because their offices are in big cities (and sometimes expensive small cities).
Editing to clarify - by tech being centred around expensive cities I don’t mean that tech offices are in urban areas rather than suburban. I mean that the large tech companies generally are in cities and towns that are more expensive than many other cities and towns.
For example, there are cheap and pleasant places big tech workers have moved to during WFH times instead of staying in the Silicon Valley-SF region of CA. But some of these towns don’t have a big office building in sight.
It's by no means universal. A lot of tech is out in suburban office parks, some of which admittedly has its own traffic problems, e.g. Silicon Valley and suburban Washington DC.
It's not "universal". Suburban city-planning is a US thing, almost exclusively (I'm told Canada follows suit). Most cities allow mixed commerce-living. Meaning there's offices, shops, factories in-between and below housing.
Yet US suburban planning -by law- disallows offices (and shops and factories) to be mixed with housing. You are often literally not allowed to live close to work (or work close to your home). that isn't universal at all.
Only that you can choose to work and live in Amsterdam, ~15 minutes cycling from work. Or Eindhoven, Nijmegen, even Enschede or Groningen. Yet many people choose to live 30 minutes car-commute (or train) from their work. E.g. because it's easier to find a place there (which suits their wishes). Reverse: I'm certain that if you live in, say, Nijmegen, you can find a job there, but many people choose to work in Arnhem, Eindhoven or Amsterdam instead travelling up and down every day.
I know. I've been there done that. In all directions.
I had to work in Arnhem once, but I chose to live in Nijmegen. If I timed it right I could do 10 minutes on the bike, 12 minutes by train and another 10 minutes by bike again. Most commutes were 40 minutes all up, which I found pretty workable. I didn't want the hassle of owning a car.
It still sounds like you're sacrificing your personal life for the sake of a commute. Good commute? Crap living situation. Good living situation? Crappy commute. Or I could just work from home and have a good living situation and no commute.
In the US, in most places, it is illegal to have work and home close to each other. You are forced to choose between commuting and WFH. In Europe no such laws exist. If anything, the opposite is cemented in laws. Meaning it's often possible to work close from where you live and vice versa.
I often work from home. But can choose to get on my bike and be in an office with colleagues, beer, pingpong and noise when I need it.
My point was that this choice is important. And that good city planning allows for such choices
Well, IANAL, but zoning and such, disallow commercial buildings (shops, offices, factories) in housing zones. I understand this differs per state or per locality even. And I think 'illegal' is probably not the right legal term either.
Zoning is usually block by block. Sure maybe your job is in a massive shopping mall that takes up 3 square blocks of space, but there will still be residences near it. The bigger issue is being priced out of living near your job.
I've lived in several cities in the US and always had the legal ability to live within a 10 minute walk of my office, but not the financial ability. It's about double the price of living roughly an hour away in morning traffic.
Ever since going remote I'm able to choose where I want to live based on the other quality-of-life factors in my neighborhood, and not have to worry about trading commute time for rent.
Not all European cities have bike lanes as good as im the Netherlands.
Zagreb, for example, has narrow bits of sidewalks painted to be "bike lanes" with street lamps and signs usually planted in the middle, lanes just stopping, etc.
Making a city more bike friendly for real (and not just checking off items on a politician todo list) is a long and painful process.
It'll happen, but right now it's easier to get stuck in traffic in a car than have to wade through the same traffic on a bike.
But Zagreb quite certainly does not have laws that prohibit living where offices and shops are. Or disallow offices and shops where people live.
Yet this is what happens in the US.
You can probably grab a tram, metro or bus to work. OFC leftovers from "city planning" under Tito/socialism means there's more distinction between "living" and "commercial" areas than most of Western Europe. But its quite certainly nowhere near as bad as the suburbanism in the US. Which was my point.
Yeah but people are weird: I’m also contracting in the Amsterdam area and I once got a fella quite stubbornly insisting I should commute daily to their office in Leeuwarden to work on their AWS stack. He even suggested I rent a room for the week if I didn’t like sitting on the train that much. Crazy
Ah, of course. But I dis find it a bit regretful, the project sounded cool and there was some Kafka involved at a time that it wasn’t as hyped/established as it is today. But no, it wasn’t worth such a crazy commute, just to have bad coffee together
I live in Europe. Have lived in many places in Europe. I don't have a distorted view.
Main point was that European cities, in general (Dublin being somewhat of an exception by my experience) don't have suburban city planning. You typically live and work in the same city. Like e.g. Downtown New York - which, I'm told is somewhat of an exception, being an "old" US city. Travel by bus, metro, bike or tram.
I hate Netherlands for that. They force sick and disabled people to cycle in winter and rain. And it is so expensive you have to live like 1 hour from work!
As opposed to left to their own devices with almost no public transit infrastructure and unwalkable curbs if their condition does not allow them to drive a car?
I was in a back-and-forth, a couple of months ago, right here on HN.
I was shocked at how people here, pretty much outright accused me of lying, because I mentioned that the typical commute time, from the area I live (and there are many, many more areas, even farther out) to the city, is measured in hours.
They keep whipping out that census site, and telling me that my eyes and experience are wrong, because Teh Internets Tubes says it's only 27 minutes (to travel 35 miles).
I have to assume that the vast majority of folks here, have never had to deal with a typical (and it is typical) US suburban commute.
If folks want to get a real (as opposed to complete fiction) idea of what a US commute is like, most cites have traffic cams on their arteries.
In the NE US, if I have to commute into the major city 45 miles or so away, whether by car or by the commuter rail that's about a 7 minute drive away, I'm almost 2 hours door to door. It's "only" about 75 minutes if I drive in after work.
Not that I ever go into my closer office any longer but that's about a 30 minute drive to an industrial park which is a very typical sort of commute. (I had about the same with another job years ago.)
At my job, the commute was about 30 minutes, as I commuted to a suburban office park (10 miles, North-South). I was in the office, five days (at least) a week, so that was 100 miles per week.
However, almost everyone that lives around me, works in the city. Many of them take the train. I know several that drive, though. They usually have highly skewed hours (they will drive in at 5AM, and come back at 3, but even then, there's a lot of traffic).
When I lived in the DC suburbs, even the suburban local commutes were crazy. I had a six-mile commute, one town South, and it often took 45 minutes. It would have been faster to bike.
I once worked with a guy who commuted to Chicago from Michigan daily by train. I think the train ride alone was 1.5 hours. Now of course that isn’t really typical (though maybe not that different from some commutes people make to New York City). Even when I lived in the city I’d have to commute about 40 miles to the suburbs a few times a week and that was normally a 1-1.5 hour drive depending on traffic, or about 2 hours if I took transit which meant two buses with a train ride in between.
I did 38 years of NYC mass transit commuting. From northern Bronx to lower Manhattan took 1.5 hours each way (1 bus, 1 train). From Flushing Queens to lower Manhattan, also 1.5 hours each way (1 bus, 2 trains).
I think this shows is really the balance between potential salary increases from switching jobs / cost reduction or improved quality of life vs. tolerable commuting distance. Improving transit will not make a huge dent in this; instead it offers people more flexibility in where to live and work. First if/when you have relative parity in job opportunities and cost of living across a large region can you really hope to make much of a dent in average commuting times.
A very common US commuting pattern is to drive from one suburb to an industrial park in another suburb. In general, there's not much you can do with transit to help in that scenario.
This is a very common and popular-on-the-Internet stance. I have worked in open office environments for ~10 years and I have not realized how unpleasant it is.
I am one of the most introverted people around, but I also don't really see why open offices are supposed to be so bad. I've had a cubicle; it was not obviously better.
Now, if the choice is office (any) vs remote, I see why offices are so bad.
Remove any sound isolation, dividers, drop-ceiling (it looks cool to have the warehouse look with exposed air ducting!), and give them hardwood floors. Is it still pleasant?
Now make it 60 people instead, and make the heavy callers 20 of those.
--
Offices are contextual, I have had offices that are 8 people properly spaced out with a couple of sound baffles in the room and they were described as "open".
I've also been thrown into a room where I was shoulder-to-shoulder with my nearest neighbours in a room that supposedly sat 45 people, with no drop ceiling, no dividers and hardwood floors... which was also described as "open".
You're describing things that just aren't problems. The sound of people walking on floors is not more disturbing than the sound of sirens going by outside. It's not disturbing at all; it's background noise.
This is so far away from my perspective that it's genuinely shocking. My gut reaction to your comment is outrage honestly.
Footsteps approaching definitely distract me, 100%, every time, especially if they're distinct footsteps like heels or boots with a solid sole on hard wood.
I don't suffer any known cognitive conditions, perhaps ADHD (but I am not diagnosed).
If it is ADHD then that affects a DIAGNOSED 13% of humanity[0], and far more people are undiagnosed, though we get better every year at diagnosing it. So if I have ADHD and this is the cause then I am far from alone here.
However, in Coffee Shop settings I can tune out the background, I have less anxiety from being disturbed, watched or expected to listen in. So, take from that what you will I guess.
Well, your considered position of "these wouldn't be problems if I weren't in an office, but if they occur in an office the only reasonable response is to FLIP OUT" is not especially convincing to me.
Excuse me. Can you please point to where I said I would flip out in an office? You're making a really large inference and honestly I don't really appreciate that.
In my situation: I suffer some amount of anxiety from being disturbed and because of that I cannot focus, I am always "on edge" waiting for something to happen in any direction of someone trying to get my attention.
I don't flip out. I suffer silently, and I only discuss it in one-on-ones or on forums such as this. Which makes people think that this is not a problem- but it is a problem, because I must focus in order to get my work done.
So instead of doing it in the office, I go home and do my actual work in my "free" time, and in the office I used to mostly procrastinate or do tasks that were urgent or took less than 15 minutes.
> Excuse me. Can you please point to where I said I would flip out in an office?
Here:
> My gut reaction to your comment* is outrage honestly.
> I cannot focus, I am always "on edge" waiting for something to happen in any direction of someone trying to get my attention.
> I suffer silently, and I only discuss it in one-on-ones or on forums such as this. Which makes people think that this is not a problem- but it is a problem, because I must focus in order to get my work done.
> So instead of doing it in the office, I go home and do my actual work in my "free" time, and in the office I used to mostly procrastinate
> in Coffee Shop settings I can tune out the background
It is a little weird that much of your most explicit discussion of flipping out comes from the same comment where you insist that you don't flip out.
That you don't vocalize your histrionics doesn't mean you're not having them. Throwing an internal fit and refusing to work is flipping out. Feeling outraged that someone might point out that open offices are objectively not bad is flipping out. By the time you've admitted that you have no problem working in a Starbucks, you've also admitted that whatever your problem with your office is, it's not related to the working conditions.
The idea that I’m choosing not to work is asinine, accusatory and completely incorrect.
That you can’t empathise is much more telling of your own sociopathy and not an indictment of my existence.
I can be very productive, but I think its obvious to everyone with a brain that if you throw someone (anyone) into an environment where they are constantly on edge then they will not be able to deliver on focused work.
I've worked 100% remote since 2015, so well before the pandemic. Last year, me and two friends who also work remotely decided to get an office together. It's a nice corner office in a good location, more or less equidistant to our individual homes. Our commute is 10-20 min on foot/bike depending on who you ask, and we've decorated the office with nice furniture, good sound etc.
We're not always there at the same time, the three of us. If the weather is inclement or someone needs to care for their child we just don't show. We've got a texting group to let each other know, but not because anyone needs to know but because we chose to keep each other informed.
It all feels very grown up and official, and it's very nice because it's ours. None of us has to ask a pointy haired boss for permission to buy a wine cooler or a new lamp, or whatever, we just do it. Sometimes we'll argue things but it's always chill. Like this week we've been going back and forth about where to place our new HomePod speakers. We just try it till we find a spot.
It helps that we're three dudes who've been friends for a good 20 years at this point. We all like working remotely, but none of us like being cooped up at home all the time.
The cost of the office space is comparable to any other office space, except for the furniture which is decidedly more high end. We're independent contractors so we've each sprung for whatever furniture we wanted to have.
I feel like this is the ultimate compromise, it works super well for us. Not saying it works for everyone, but I could totally see a world in where employees pick whatever works for them, and employers foot the bill for reasonable expenses like the space, but maybe not for the fancy couch, I dunno.
Anyway, my point with sharing this story is that as much as I love our office, I couldn't have my own room. I can't function in a completely private space. I know others can, and I respect that, but I just can't. But open plan doesn't work for me either, there's a point where it becomes too much. I feel like an office with 2-4 people who are respectful with one another is just right for me.
And maybe that's it, maybe not everyone fits the same mold, so maybe the future of a good working space is choose your own adventure? Not that it's without its challenges, it took us some 6 months or so to find the right spot!
That sounds delightful! I started my current role 100% remote in 2020 but missed being around people. 3 days per week in the office in 2021 was awesome, and there were typically only a handful of people in the open office environment with low cube walls. In 2022 groups started coming back consistently, with Wednesdays being most loud.
Noise canceling headphones are a must. I can hear everything from all around and it's overwhelming at times.
In my prior role I shared a huge office with 2 other people, and later had a large office to myself with a big U shaped desk, small circle table and chairs, a whiteboard, and coworkers right across the hall. It was a great work environment.
this was the way my small business operated. except we all worked for the company, of course. it's pretty great to just outfit the office how you see fit. i had a couch in my office and would just take naps whenever the hell i wanted.
it was awesome for years until they decided to triple our rent when our 5 year lease ended. this was in 2016. we transitioned successfully to wfh. i have absolutely no sympathy for the hurting CRE business these days, they dug their own grave through an insane amount of greed brought on by super favorable tax treatments.
i still take naps on my couch though, so that hasn't changed.
We have a lot of people full remote now, so when those of us still in the area do go to the office, there are constant video chats going on. Being in office is like 2x as bad as it was.
Absolutely agree. Going to the office really isn't that bad, if you have some decent privacy. The benefits of face-to-face communication are really great. But an open office takes so much privacy away and so much ability to concentrate. It's not worth it.
I worked in a couple of open offices. The worst was one where "hot desking" was a thing and they didn't even have meeting rooms. All meetings were conducted at the desks using Skype. I didn't know from day to day who I would be sat with and how much noise they were going to make.
After that I was still in an open office but it had no hot desking and people didn't take calls at their desk. That was a lot better. After the first one it seemed great.
Then COVID happened and I started working from home and it was amazing. I questioned whether I'd even done any work in the past few years. It was so much better.
Then I got depressed because living in the same four walls day in day out gets to you.
Now my workplace has also reintroduced cubicles and I work mostly from home still but regularly work in the office in a cubicle. This is the bet set up I've had so far. I get enough of a dose of "office" but I'm still able to actually work in the office. I get to do the majority of my "head down" work in peace in a familiar environment with no commute. It's pretty good.
Sums it up nicely. My experience with open office, I despised. Impossible to have any focused train of thought. I found in the morning and during the day it was constantly disruptive. Headphones are a bandaid that makes it worse most of the time. But during the evening, when there was less of us having some company around actually helped productivity as you're not normally functioning 100% by then anyways. There was an ebb and flow but an office that is designed strictly open or strictly opposite both seem bad. There should be a balance of common, colaborative space and isolation focus. I also find that most office designs have excessive lighting, where the color temp and dimming is unadjustable. There is no way to just have screen light mixed only with natural light during daylight hours. I think workers should have the ability to isolate in a tiny room sometimes, ability to work in a more collaborative space when they find it suitable, but also have time to sit at a desk in a space that is semi isolated but still somewhat open. I don't understand the drive to go to either extreme and not offer any flexibility.
The wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
The most important want is that of the executive who can open the door of his office and gaze out at the sea of reportees and down-levels assigned under him in the corporate org chart. After all, he's the one who decides on office layout and WFH policies.
Having been around for cubicles, its surprising to see them described by a new generation as some kind of utopian ideal. Even if they are round now, instead of square. Roundicles?
Best not think too much about what we will call the ones for the test team.
I remember in the 90s, when I was a teenager, my Dad's work at Allergan (in Irvine, Orange County, California, not far from Blizzard's office) had a cubicle layout. Sometimes he took me inside, and it was just terrible. This was also one of the themes of Office Space, an excellent movie making fun of workplace culture (starring Jennifer Aniston and Ron Livingston). In one memorable scene of the movie, after Livingston's character has had enough of the toxic workplace culture and stops giving a fuck, he unscrews the cubicle walls so he can see out the window from his desk.
I would definitely prefer to work in an open-office environment vs cubicles. I also don't want an office, because I don't even want to go to work regularly anymore.
The best option for me would be: (i) go to work 2-3 times a week to get out of the house (ii) hot desk open office layout with (iii) lots of meeting rooms.
> I would definitely prefer to work in an open-office environment vs cubicles.
That's fine as long as you understand that for certain types of people and/or certain types of work - open plan can be a disaster. This discussion has been bouncing back and forth for decades.
Personally speaking my coding productivity drops something like 80% in an open plan office.
It's so true. 80% gets lost but you feel like you've done so much more just getting to the office by the time you arrive your job is to kill time. You can now bother others all day and look productive.
The issue isn't that cubicles are good, they aren't. The issue is that open office plans are worse. If your work is calls and emails that can be chopped up in 10 minute increments then an open office is great because that how long you can concentrate between distractions, if you need to think they are productivity killers that would give mandatory shots every 10 minutes a run for their money.
We have oscillated back and forth with each being the exciting new solution for what sucks about the other for decades, though. This is just the latest swing of the pendulum to one or the other.
I guess they are round now, maybe that was the one missing ingredient that means we will be on cubicles forever and everyone will finally understand why they are better?
If you read Cal Newport's biography, he works in academia, he has never worked a 9-5 industry job, eg. at Meta or any other (software) company. CMIIW.
So, he doesn't really have any personal experience to comment on what works or doesn't work at a large software company like Meta, the same way a SWE at Meta doesn't have any personal experience to comment on what works or doesn't work for a Professor at Georgetown University. Also, to be more specific, he's a Professor of Comp.Sci., not Professor of Psychology or Professor of Workplace Layout Optimization..
I read 2-3 of his books and concluded that he doesn't know what he's talking about. His books are 10 page blog posts tortured to be 300 page books.
I tried to read his Deep Work book, and it was truly awful. Usually I avoid writing reviews for books that I didn't finish, but Deep Work is one of the worst books I've ever tried to read. To describe it as a 10 page blog post would be generous.
I could not take the book seriously due to how shallow it was. Written to sound clever, but lacking any actual substance. It literally could have been 2 pages of bullet points and delivered more value by dropping the pseudoscience nonsense and excessive "[famous name] is productive because they do X" trope.
The only takeaway I got was that Deep Work is a bullshit term for having focus.
I thought it was the perfect level of depth, contrast this with something like "Art of Impossible" which spends paragraphs talking about your biochemistry and how it impacts motivation, focus, etc- I couldn't get through it because I don't care about biochemistry, I just want actionable advice with concrete examples from high performers so I can think about how and if I want to apply the advice to my life.
Sure, here are the most impactful changes, they may sound simple to some, but they had a big impact on me:
1. I had already been blocking out "no meeting" time of 2-4 hours a day to get work done, but during this time I would listen to music and sometimes check slack. The book got me to use focus mode on my Mac and phone, set a "heads down until [time x]" away message on Slack and work without music or any other distractions ON ONE HARD PROBLEM. My effectiveness skyrocketed and I was happier at work (the only downside was that I wanted to work more).
2. When dealing with a hard problem, taking a break, taking a walk and thinking through the problem using the framework he mentioned in the book, have used this method to solve multiple hard problems.
3. Forced me systematize how I end my work day and what time I end it (unless there's an emergency)
I read Deep Work. Twice. It has truly helped me in my life. I have done some really great work of my life using it: created value-adding solutions in Computer Vision, worked three research papers.
I am much more saner, calmer, and get more done because I adopted Deep Work philosophy in my life.
I would highly advise reading the book and judging for yourselves (for the people reading the above comment).
You realize that you don’t need personal experience to solve theoretical problems? Especially ones that have been treated by experts in the area for decades prior.
Can you point me to the Wikipedia page for the Theory of Optimal Workplace Layout?
Because if this is a theoretical problem, with clear definitions, parameters, boundary conditions and objectives, which has already been solved, so that non-experts [such as CN] can just look up the solution, then I'd also like to see this!
Surely you understand you were being challenged on the existence of an established theoretical solution, not on the existence of a literal link to Wikipedia specifically?
This is a weird mathematical fundamentalism that I haven’t experienced in a while. Actually since I went to study philosophy with analytic philosophers.
I've read deep work and found it okay. It's satisfying reading it because I already know the content is true and I like to know other people are discussing it too.
But I agree, many authors just pick a topic and run with it. Not having experience doesn't stop them.
Yeah, most of this article is pretty unsubstantiated. Meta isn’t paying a 40% premium for open offices, almost every other tech company has a similar floor plan. And pre—Covid the offices were much more than 30% utilized, I’m guessing that figure comes from the percent of people actually at their desks at any given time.
Which ties into my last remark- even the largest building at Meta isn’t an 8 acre field of open offices. There are tons of conference rooms, cafes, 1-2 person rooms, open spaces and other rooms to break up the space and provide opportunities for collaboration. It’s not as nice as a private office but better then some other companies I’ve seen post-Covid, where they’ve minimized their footprint to the extent that you can’t find an open desk or conference room when another team is having an on-site.
I’m not sure whether this is an intentional misrepresentation of facts or just a complete lack of fact-checking but I was pretty disappointed in this article.
I worked in open offices for years. Recently I got a room for just myself. It is so much better than I ever could imagine. My last place in the open office was really bad, just next to coffee machine. It was the worst place to work ever. Every 5 Minutes somebody started to talk to me. Now in my own room, nobody distract me. This is really day and night.
You will work in the Meta Cube(TM), and you'll be happy! /s
I hope that this is the first step on the road to allowing more people to have a private office. This seems to be a temporary fix to work within the constraints of buildings that were designed to be open offices.
I work in a shared office with 3 other people (described by my boss at the time as a "bullpen". Lots of chatter, people coming in and out, other employees coming in for whatever...it is definitely distracting.
My solution to this was to listen to "brown noise" on my over-ear headphones while I was in there trying to work. Then I remembered my ancient Gear Iconx Samsung bluetooth earbuds had built-in storage. I loaded a 20 loop of brown noise in there so I don't have to tether it to my phone all the time and I started using that.
It really does make a difference in terms of focusing and getting things done. Even random mumblings from my office mates, hallways conversations etc. don't distract me.
I hear ya, I'd rather not be working there and I do find excuses to work off site when I can (sadly a large portion of my role needs me in the facility).
Definitely, most people using noise to treat a noise problem will sooner or later get tinnitus and hearing loss if they do this constantly over years. Btw, I have tinnitus, it's not fun. Protect your ears people.
It's all about the volume. I'm not listening at a high volume since the brown noise does a great job of blocking out all sounds. It's actually quite soothing, kind of like a waterfall.
If you need to do actual work, an office is the best. If you're doing BAU 9-6 clockwatching type job with no real deliverables, the social aspects of an open plan office make this torture a little more tolerable for most people.
I was always a fan of cubicles, and never got the FAANG fascination with open plan workspaces, that the entire industry seems to have adopted. As the article says, the noise and distraction were always an issue. Even if you used headphones, as most people did most of the time, there were still visual distractions in your peripheral vision. It was a nightmare for productivity, and I'm surprised that the false narrative of how they promote collaboration stuck around this long.
Cubicles were great, especially if you got one near a window. You had the outside view; desks were angular in large cubicles so you had ample space for multiple monitors; the barriers provided just enough visual and noise isolation, while you could always prop up and chat with your neighbors; the barriers also served as tackboards, and people decorated their spaces in unique ways. Et cetera.
I still don't want to go back to working in an office, even if I had a personal space with a door, which most companies can't afford, but they should bring back the cubicle. It will probably be renamed and marketed as something else, but kudos to Meta for taking the lead.
Why can't FAANG companies use their budget to make cubicles with sound proofing and a closable door behind you? Similar to Japanese manga cafe booths. All the advantages of a private office but you can cram more of them in per square metre. Keep the door open to be social, close it and be fully isolated when you need to concentrate.
I slept in one of these manga kissa and I remember waking up in the middle of the night and looking at the ceiling and seeing my neighbor's head popping and looking at me from above. I didn't say anything, and he slowly retracted his head when he saw that I was looking straight at him. Didn't prevent me sleeping because I had ingested alcohol that night, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is typical manga kissa weirdness.
It's not typical. At least the ones I've been to are completely sealed. Sometimes there is a window built into the door, mostly so people can check you're not doing naughty things in there.
edit: some manga kissa are designed for people to watch porn, obviously those don't have windows.
Yeah. Maybe this is beyond HN but I wanted to try VR porn back when VR headsets weren't a thing so I rented one. You literally pay like $5 for the booth and have free reign over renting a few DVDs from their 10k+ DVD collection, plus a vending machine than dispenses lube and sex toys, and unlimited videos in VR. The booth itself was totally sealed in and sound proof. The whole facility is open 24 hours. Having small cramped houses creates a need for this sort of business I guess!
My university library had these. Big enough for 2 or 3 people to co-operate, small enough to use solo in quiet times without being a egregious space hog, and translucent acoustic panels that went from about 6 inches from the floor to about 2.5 metres (easy to see occupancy without being a fish-bowl).
That sounds like hell. People need sunlight to live.
The solution is not cubicles, or even closed offices. Just open offices with ~1/3 of the regular density of people per square metre would be good. It also gets you the promised "seamless collaboration" of open offices.
Cubicles are already a thing, my suggestion just allows you to close the door when you need to focus. I personally don't need sunlight though, or any kind of view, maybe other people are different. That's one of the great things about the remote work boom, if you want to have a work environment full of natural sunlight, you can just work from home!
Just like the FAANG interview process, which is basically completely arbitrary based on what's hot (puzzles, leetcode), they can afford the waste. "An army of engineers who get maybe 20 minutes of focus per day? We gots the money to burn!"
Smaller companies follow these trends because they think it will make them successful. It's like reading the latest article on "Ten morning routines of billionaires", following that, and believing that it will make you rich. It's the other way around.
I noticed that my Google interview process was way more involved in reverse engineering (read this code and figure out what it does, or what's wrong with it), whereas Facebook was much more leetcody.
I've been thinking that reverse engineering skills are much more useful than puzzle solving.
> I noticed that my Google interview process was way more involved in reverse engineering
I had such a question at Google. I guessed what was the problem they were trying to solve as it was a classic leetcode question (linking nodes in a tree while traversing it). So while the format is a bit different than typical leetcode solving, I'd say it's still the same type of skills and preparation involved (at least in my case).
There's value in white board interviews. Candidates can't cheat their way through them. I realised the value in them during the lockdowns when interviews went online and I found that a few candidates were cheating. Sadly the interviewer guidelines at the company I was working at that time, explicitly forbade me from writing anything about candidates cheating in the interview feedback, and instead required you to just "notify" the recruiter about it. The gradient of the falling hiring bar, only got steeper.
Also, the bit about puzzles, leetcode is somewhat of a myth, mostly perpetuated by salty candidates who couldn't pass tech interview loops, for whatever reason. Puzzles were explicitly banned at Meta and Google, when I worked there, and if a question is found on leetcode or a similar site (as they eventually do), they'd get banned too. The idea isn't to make candidates jump through a series of pointless hoops, but to concretely evaluate their coding and reasoning abilities. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a lot more BS proof that just having a chat or take home assignments. Also, needless to say, more senior candidates are expected to successfully grapple with harder problems.
>Sadly the interviewer guidelines at the company I was working at that time, explicitly forbade me from writing anything about candidates cheating in the interview feedback
The interviewer could have honestly made a mistake thinking the candidate cheated when the candidate did not. Or the candidate thought something was allowed but the interviewer did not communicate that it was not.
At any rate, there's a chance the accusation was wrong, and if you make wrong accusations and the other person disputes it, it could lead to unnecessary legal proceedings. (libel, etc.)
PS: not saying the company policy by the GP is necessarily correct, just saying what lawyers and risk adverse bureaucrats might be thinking when they drafted it.
The partitions are covered with fabric in considerable part to muffle noise, and the presence of the partitions themselves also helps with that. Too, cubicles have a larger footprint than open-plan desks do, so fewer people fit in a given space.
I have worked in both, and an open plan is vastly noisier and more distracting than a cubicle.
Private offices are of course better, and anywhere I've worked the norm has been to be open door unless there's some specific reason to close it. But, yeah, cubicles > open office though I've been pretty much remote for years now even if I theoretically had a desk in an office.
Another model that I personally found ideal was the small open office. One place I worked had 4-8 people in an open setup in rooms that were conference room type sizes.
It was a great setup as you’d build nice team dynamics and easily talk, but didn’t need assistive technology like headphones and white noise machines to function.
15 years later, I’m probably skill in regular contact with about 50% of the people I worked with in that environment.
The thing I don’t get is why go to work for privacy when I can get that at home in my own office?
I am interested to see how work habits change and evolve. For me personally mostly working from home and then heading in to something of an open office with conference rooms is ideal because on the in-office day the only reason for me to be there is peer collaboration anyway so I wouldn’t need an office.
My impression is that a lot of companies are reconfiguring (and possibly shrinking) space with the aim to make offices more meeting and collaboration spaces rather than individual work spaces.
For a lot of companies at this point, having dedicated individual work spaces for most employees doesn't make a lot of sense unless they have specific equipment needs and are going to come in most days.
Because one wants to have private in person communication. In my experience cubical and closed door office environments maximize communication and collaboration while open concept reduce it.
Closed doors are like therapist room - you get to the meaning of topics fast. They allow conflict resolution and discussion.
Open concept are like libraries, everyone is silently trying to to disturb each other working. Full of visual and audible distractions.
WFH remote meeting have the lowest form of communication bandwidth. It's hard to arbitrage interactions with no visual cues, invites multi-tasking during meetings, and encourages disengagement.
I think open concepts are more akin to cafeteria than libraries. Some people had done great gigs that always came from a table in their University cafeteria, and trying to industrialize that experience.
The range of sound basically reaches as far as the space is open and it can travel through air (over-simplification). If you put anything between a sound emitter and the receiver, it'll block out (some) sound. If that anything is made out of sound-absorbing material (something soft basically, again over-simplification), it'll absorb even more sound.
The principle behind cubicles is to reduce the amount of open space immediately around you, with sound-absorbing material so both the sound you emit, and the sound others emit, travel more upwards than side-ways as the cubicle walls force the sound up, essentially making the environment more silent, if you are situated in a cubicle. If you were to be hanging from the roof above all cubicles, you'd get to hear basically all the sounds coming from the cubicles.
It's a pretty basic solution, something better would be actual private offices where everyone is enclosed fully, then you can make the environment really quiet. But that's also way more expensive and requires more space.
Cubicles are typically acoustic in nature to dampen sound. My cubicle had a window behind me and a door. People used to decorate their cubes, if you had kids their art was all over the place, your desk was typically much bigger and you had way more storage options. A proper cubicle was just a small private office with thinner walls.
I'm not sure that's the case. Most companies lease their floors space. The offices themselves are built to a standard height or code, so the actual walls needed for internal offices are easy to procure, and manufactured en-masse.
Sure, there's a sunk cost to it, but once you're past start up size, your company is probably wasting more money on many other things (entertainment, lunch, free merch, and so on) than a one-off floor reconfiguration to accommodate offices.
At the other extreme, I worked for Megabank. They had a couple of buildings, with a total floor count of around 70, in the basement they had not hundreds, but thousands of partition walls stacked up and ready for use, so they could reconfigure the offices as needed. But, of course, only for senior management. Everyone else had to work in open plan offices.
The cost of private offices isn't in the construction, it's in the increased square footage you need to lease because they take more space per worker than an open floor plan or cubicles.
As I said in reply to another comment that suggested that you'd lose 50% or require 2x the space:
A typical 'cubicle' has a wide desk and space to move you chair in and out of, plus a 'corridor' between all the cubicles. Change cubicle walls to office walls and have doors open into the existing corridor, and it's no different in size. Building codes might require some changes but I don't think it will anywhere near as much as 2x.
The literature (Spolsky lists it one of his articles) implies that increased productivity of the existing employees in their own offices more than compensates for the slight decrease in the number of people you can pack into a fixed area.
The difference with start-ups vs non-start-ups, is that in that first 6-12 months, it is typically a small group of people completely focused on getting the business up and running, and writing greenfield code. My point is that the environment, both the physical open plan office, and the 'coding environment' are totally different it's quite dynamic for start ups where it's just getting new code up and running and iterating quickly on ideas, vs. much more 'static' when the company has an existing product and code base.
> personal space with a door, which most companies can't afford
A company that cannot afford proper offices is probably not creating much value. Big tech companies can afford offices. They choose to allocate capital differently.
When I ran a consultancy, I spent a lot of rent of making sure my employees had both proper offices where they could think and common areas where they could collaborate. Doing otherwise is foolish.
>When I ran a consultancy, I spent a lot of rent of making sure my employees had both proper offices where they could think and common areas where they could collaborate. Doing otherwise is foolish.
Looking back, wouldn't it have made more sense to not spend alot on rent and let the employees work at home? Granted, no common areas to collaborate.
I'd like to see your data on that. When covid hit and sent everyone home I was working in the Danish public sector and we saw an increase in productivity. People worked less hours, or at least, they were using their computers for less hours, but they delivered more.
It probably would've lead to reforms if it wasn't because the employee satisfaction didn't do equally well. As you might imagine, covid was hard on middle managers, but it also turned out that quite a lot of employees (public sector might be very different than tech) got very lonely while working from home every day.
> it also turned out that quite a lot of employees (public sector might be very different than tech) got very lonely while working from home every day.
There’s your answer, demoralized employees are unproductive.
For me, who’s made the decision to live 1.1 miles from the office, my commute (either biking or walking) is a positive benefit. During Covid WFH I would try to get out for a similar length of walk in the morning, but it’s better for my brain to get into work mode by actually traveling to a different space.
Might have also been that recreational places were mostly closed or on limited hours, and many people forced into working from home didn't have adequate physical space or time management habits to create boundaries.
It makes more sense now. Back then we did not have as many good tools for remote collaboration. My business had certain other constraints that made physical space necessary.
Come on, realistically, no company can afford private offices for all their workforce. Even for roles that do require complete concentration like programming, it's not feasible to expect even Big Tech companies to foot the bill. The infrastructure cost alone would be astronomical. Such buildings just don't scale, and the setup couldn't keep up with the growth rate. So at best, they can have private offices for tech leads, managers and senior staff, but this undeniably goes against the "flat" organizational structure some companies like to virtue signal.
What can be much more manageable is to have comfortable cubicles for everyone (not the cramped desks with dividers, which is what probably gave cubicles the bad rep), and also have many small and large meeting rooms where people can congregate and collaborate in. This has the benefit of defaulting to semi-private workspaces which can easily scale, and moves the noisy collaborative areas to closed rooms, so that they don't bother anyone else. The smaller rooms could even serve as rotating private offices, if needed, that anyone can book for a limited period of time.
But the open floor office only has practical drawbacks, and definitely has to go. It only got popular because it's really the cheapest option for companies; just place some desks, chairs and monitors in a huge space, and sell it as "collaborative". But if they really want to entice people to come back to the office, they need to invest in better working conditions.
Do these companies hire thousands of employees a year? I doubt that.
Private offices for everyone just doesn't scale at the same growth rate of tech companies. Where would they realistically fit thousands of new employees per year if everyone had their own office?
> I benefit from my equity holdings in tech companies. They are choosing to give that money to me in valuation instead of building out proper offices.
And you expect the buildings to just magically expand for new employees? I'd rather not take a pay cut, and "settle" for comfortable cubicles. Or better yet, work remotely, and get a raise from the money the company is saving on not having to pay for my office space.
You are conflating costs with difficulty. I agree that it is difficult to manage growth. This is a way in which some organizations create more value per person and per dollar expended.
One approach is for an organization to use open offices while they are building out proper offices.
Facebook's open plan set up didn't come cheap. A Facebook insider once gave me a ballpark figure of how much their giant aircraft hanger cost and I recall it being 3x the price per square foot of private office space which means about 1 - 1.5x the price per employee.
I'm not saying these buildings are "cheap". Just objectively, it's much cheaper to transform a "giant aircraft hangar" (which sounds awful, BTW) into open floor working spaces, than to use the same space to build and design individual offices for everyone. I'm not a civil engineer, but the windows, walls, ventilation, cabling, cooling/heating, etc., is surely much more expensive for individual offices than what open spaces in a "hangar" would require. The cost of interior design would be substantially lower as well. How could this be 3x the price per square foot of private office space? Was this some expensive military property?
I visited one of these open office spaces recently. It is ridiculous. They have white noise generators in the ceiling. In order to be heard when talking with someone adjacent, one has to speak loud enough to disturb others. Almost everyone wears headphones and does not collaborate in person. They should just be working from home.
I recommend that all those who might compete with me adopt these situations and give up on the difficulties of managing office space.
> How could this be 3x the price per square foot of private office space?
It was designed by Frank Gehry and built by Gensler for a client that had an open pocket book. You'd be surprised at how much a pane of glass can cost when it's glass that has to go into a Frank Gehry building.
What on Earth is wrong with traditional offices with normal doors? Cubicles always make me think of cattle, they are like open space but you have limited view so someone can stalk you without you noticing that or surprise you etc. Thank goodness we can easily work remotely these days.
Open spaces allow easier monitoring and easier allocation (hot seats). This cubicle wont last long before they rediscover the need of management which is easier management (easy monitor+easy allocation). I give it 3 years at most.
Amen amen amen. I had always hated open offices. I was even ridiculed for my hatred for them. Heck il take offices if I could but I know I can't get too greedy! How did we ever start buying into it as developers? Was it just Stockholm syndrome. "Tech is the savior so everything we do must be the greatest"? Hope this trend continues to other companies too. I do wonder what startups are gonna do here. They do have cost issues and they didn't mind copying the fangs so it worked out back then.
I feel like I remember reading about some think tank or design firm from the 50s-80s that did some sort of deep dive into workplace settings and their correlated productivity and whether they were preferred. Does anyone know about something like this? I don't really remember the specifics about the report. I just have a vague memory of reading about it.
The driving issues are the area per employee in the working area, the number of employees present, the volume of the employee conversations, and the sound absorption of the office surfaces.
Meta packed lots of people into small spaces where everyone has crappy for audio phones in an industrial look with concrete floors. It was worse than a trading floor imho
… the knowledge sector completely disregarded any realities about how human brains actually go about the difficult task of creating value through cogitation…
This, why are knowledge-based companies so bad at designing work for the brain’s best capabilities?
Every sweatshop is an open plan. Open plan was never trendy. It's a way to cut cost. Calling it trendy is like saying starving people are on a trendy diet. That's just insulting. Everyone wants their own office. A cubicle is the next best thing. Open plan is the worst and cheapest option. I've never had a boss who didn't have his own office. Going from cubicle to open plan is an obvious downgrade.
You may be right that this was the actual motivation, but it was and still is often justified as some sort of cutting edge way to spread ideas and "foster communication" and I know lots of people who bought those stupid ideas.
Cubicle isn't that much more expensive than open plan, especially when you are paying devs $200-300k a year. I think it's more about "fostering communication" and making the workspace "appear to be" more enjoyable. Of course we devs know it's a horrible distracting environment.
I heard the same, but there is no peer reviewed paper that has ever claimed that open office environments foster collaboration or assist communication.
Rather, every single study has asserted that it decreases communication.
Yet, it's clung to.
Which is why I think it's purely a cost saving (or flexibility?) move.
Office managers must love not having to care about how teams are sized? Only thing I can think of.
And people forget that before the invention of the cubicle, open office plans were the norm for nonmanagement office workers. The cubicle was viewed by these workers as a wonderful thing, because it brought an end to the nightmare of the open office.
When I interviewed with Boeing in the early 80s, their setup was a big open area filled with individual desks and ringed by offices with big glass partitions.
I was reviewing a new open office layout with a CEO one day. I pointed out that my new desk was surrounded by people who smoke. I was not a smoker. The CEO ignored my comment and I had to sit there smelling the smoker stink of my coworkers. I'm not sure cubicles would have helped or not.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadI don't have strong opinion on the lack of privacy. I've been body doubling full-time in work for the last few years and I never felt need for more privacy. I can always go somewhere else if I need to take a break. However, ymmv.
Man, in the 80s we thought of cubicles as the cheapass option. I never did have an office.
After decades and decades there are still no conclusive results about how different types of workplaces influence productivity and mental health, but even if there were manager would not even look at them and instead make decisions based on perceived productivity and "common sense".
We are already incapable of replicating studies with fewer variables.
A survey of company success (measured in profits, or market cap) vs office layout, trying to see if there is correlation would be more useful. Even accounting for the fact that there is a lot of cargo culting, and unhappy employees.
No idea about the latter, though I'm much happier having removed a 3 hour round-trip train commute (will it turn up on time? will it even turn up? will it be delayed en route?), but as far as productivity is concerned, my previous employer, like others went fully remote during COVID, and then stayed that way, based on internal evidence.
For all development teams across the company (green field, existing, maintenance, whatever), the number of PRs almost doubled for each team, and slightly less tangible metrics such as down-time, bug reports, decreased by non-trivial amounts, and quite a few product milestones were hit early, by quite some margin. That on its own was statistically significant, as pre-COVID, I don't think they hit any milestone dates.
Of course, you can argue that all of those are due to less meetings, less interruptions, easier availability of people to diagnose problems, and perhaps even better planning is required for being remote, but ultimately, all of those have improved the productivity of my former employer.
I get that some people prefer to be alone, but these days why not work remotely?
Leave your walls, collaborate in the collaboration areas, care less about how loud you're being when you get animated about something you're enjoying working on or your new ideas; because you're not killing the focus of the people in their focus areas.
Good work requires variation, collaboration and focus. So, for me how it sounds when you say this is: "people who are given the capability to focus really bum me out"
As for the requirements of "good work", those vary with the nature of the job. One of the reasons I've always worked in an open plan office, aside from them being much more common in the UK, is that I work in finance, often on or close to trading floors. That's not an environment that benefits from cubicles and I believe they're rare in this industry in the US too.
But mainly, it's what I'm used to and what I like. I never said you had to feel the same.
It's the first letter that's capitalised, BTW. "Emacs", not "eMacs".
Cube farms FTW. You can get over-the-wall collaboration on occasion without the visual distraction and the cubicle walls help dampen noise/conversation from further away.
It's not as good as a closed office for heads down work, but it's a 100x improvement over open offices where you see every movement, hear every sound, and perpetually feel like you're on display.
Open offices are there to save money because you can pack more people into them than cubicles. Cubicles are there to save money because you can pack more people into them than offices.
If you like open offices, you'll love when they switch you to hoteling so you have no permanent desk, but still need to come into the office!
One does not imply the other. I also prefer open office over cubicle. But not having a permanent desk could be done in a cubicle farm as well. It's an orthogonal dimension of corporate hell.
I need my mise en place.
Ah thank you for the concise distillation of my feeling.
It's the same axis when you look at it as "how do I fit X developers a space that costs Y dollars, and I'm trying to minimize Y."
No idea why nobody does this. Japan has been offering these kind of sealed workspaces in manga cafes and "private video watching booths" for decades.
You can mitigate some of the noise with a good pair of noise cancelling headphones. There are far more fundamental reasons for them paying that premium.
Also, sometimes I like having music/noise on but sometimes not.
I think I'm on my third pair of Sennheiser HD280s in 25 years, because the plastic does wear out.
I got some airpods pro for their supposedly great ANC and was really disappointed in how limited it actually was.
For me, headphones make an open office setup worse, not better. It's not mostly about the noise for me as much as it's about motion. When I wear headphones, I am more "on alert" because I can't tell if people are behind me or not.
Cant remember where I read it, but I have no problem believing it.
The cubicle itself has utility, nobody denied that
When the startups became huge and successful, they didn’t go back to cubicles because the open office was what they used when they were having business success.
Then all the other companies started copying them because they think it will lead them to be more innovative like the startups.
Serious question, how would we measure that, and is there any empirical evidence for the idea startups "need" more? I imagine a lot of it is an immediate workaround for a system nobody wants to bother building, like a mailing list or design-specs.
yes, it is Good Actually that we are continually questioning and testing received wisdom. If we end up reinventing old things from first principles, that means we have all the more confidence in them, rather than relying on the unalive momentum of tradition and path dependence.
people who sneer at reinvention can be too smug sometimes. we owe all progress to the unreasonable men and women who are too arrogant to do anything but poke and prod at life on their own terms.
Or you know, alternatively you could understand where the wisdom comes from instead of being clueless about it and think that one can make things better with a snap of fingers.
I don't think gp is talking about continuous refinement of ideas, which I get the sense is more what you meant. Spending time and energy reinventing cubicles again and again every 10 or so years seems best to avoid, in my opinion.
Next up: "Should we bother wiping our asses? Hot startup DirtyButt claims to save you 30-45 seconds per day. 'If you think about it, going #2 is one of the grossest experiences people go through in their daily lives,' says Teyron Flanders, founder of DirtyButt. 'I bet I've spent more than several hours of my life putting my hands dangerously close to human waste. That's something I'd rather never do.' Now an A-list unicorn valued at more than seven hundred billion dollars, the startup offers no-wipe bootcamps, a double-thick underwear prototype, and organic options. 'What we're really giving people is freedom. Remember the run on toilet paper from pandemic times? We're going to relegate that dark chapter to the ash heap of history.'"
Stupid idea after stupid idea.
This is sounding more realistic than jucero!
Or not. Your call.
You mean the men and women who insisted on open office for everyone but themselves ?
More reconfigurable softer spaces is exciting to me. Cubicles are hard & fixed infrastructure. Having more dynamic use of space invigorates me, helps me escape a feeling of being trapped by routine.
The focus on sound absorbing material seems also extremely compelling. Sound dampening can have enormous impact & I can imagine some of these partitions doing a lot (ideally with the help of some more room treatment) to make the space pleasant.
I think that arrangement is a good balance between being able to put your headphones on and focus on your work with a bit of privacy, but also being able to turn your chair around and brainstorm things or quickly chat to an architect, etc.
Also the need for meeting rooms is lower with offices.
The literature (Spolsky lists it one of his articles) implies that increased productivity of the existing employees in their own offices more than compensates for the slight decrease in the number of people you can pack into a fixed area.
There would still be the long commute to deal with. Not worth it
Which, if I'm to believe "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel¹ is common in the US due to broken city planning.
But really not in most of Europe. My cycle to an office is 20 minutes. And in the Netherlands that is considered a long cycling journey. Europe has it's car infested traffic jams too, don't get me wrong. But many of those stuck in those jams could choose to work close to home, or live close to offices. Houses and offices most often are intermixed in European (and often asian) cities.
¹https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes
I do that 10 minute bike ride.. to the train station.. then I take the train 1h in each direction three times a week and consider myself lucky for not having to do it every day. The trains are packed.
But a claim that some majority of people can just bike 10 or 20 minutes to the office was just a bit wild considering my experience living here in NL and taking the train so often. Having said that, it is true that I can bike anywhere in the city I live in within half an hour, and I don't own a car because I can get anywhere by bike or train. The fact that I can do these things allows me to work in another city, instead of being bound to live in a certain restricted location, without even owning a car.
But many people do drive, don't be confused. There are times when it would be really convenient to use a car, and I would be using a car sharing service if it weren't for the fact that my license is not valid here and I need to pass tests which is a long process.
Editing to clarify - by tech being centred around expensive cities I don’t mean that tech offices are in urban areas rather than suburban. I mean that the large tech companies generally are in cities and towns that are more expensive than many other cities and towns.
For example, there are cheap and pleasant places big tech workers have moved to during WFH times instead of staying in the Silicon Valley-SF region of CA. But some of these towns don’t have a big office building in sight.
It's by no means universal. A lot of tech is out in suburban office parks, some of which admittedly has its own traffic problems, e.g. Silicon Valley and suburban Washington DC.
Only that you can choose to work and live in Amsterdam, ~15 minutes cycling from work. Or Eindhoven, Nijmegen, even Enschede or Groningen. Yet many people choose to live 30 minutes car-commute (or train) from their work. E.g. because it's easier to find a place there (which suits their wishes). Reverse: I'm certain that if you live in, say, Nijmegen, you can find a job there, but many people choose to work in Arnhem, Eindhoven or Amsterdam instead travelling up and down every day.
I know. I've been there done that. In all directions.
In the US, in most places, it is illegal to have work and home close to each other. You are forced to choose between commuting and WFH. In Europe no such laws exist. If anything, the opposite is cemented in laws. Meaning it's often possible to work close from where you live and vice versa.
I often work from home. But can choose to get on my bike and be in an office with colleagues, beer, pingpong and noise when I need it.
My point was that this choice is important. And that good city planning allows for such choices
What do you mean by illegal?
I've lived in several cities in the US and always had the legal ability to live within a 10 minute walk of my office, but not the financial ability. It's about double the price of living roughly an hour away in morning traffic.
Ever since going remote I'm able to choose where I want to live based on the other quality-of-life factors in my neighborhood, and not have to worry about trading commute time for rent.
Zagreb, for example, has narrow bits of sidewalks painted to be "bike lanes" with street lamps and signs usually planted in the middle, lanes just stopping, etc.
Making a city more bike friendly for real (and not just checking off items on a politician todo list) is a long and painful process.
It'll happen, but right now it's easier to get stuck in traffic in a car than have to wade through the same traffic on a bike.
Yet this is what happens in the US.
You can probably grab a tram, metro or bus to work. OFC leftovers from "city planning" under Tito/socialism means there's more distinction between "living" and "commercial" areas than most of Western Europe. But its quite certainly nowhere near as bad as the suburbanism in the US. Which was my point.
I guess you found another client quickly?
Main point was that European cities, in general (Dublin being somewhat of an exception by my experience) don't have suburban city planning. You typically live and work in the same city. Like e.g. Downtown New York - which, I'm told is somewhat of an exception, being an "old" US city. Travel by bus, metro, bike or tram.
”In terms of distance undertaken, one fifth of Europeans (23.3%) travel, on average, further than 40 km or even more each day”
24% of Americans have a 15 min or less commute versus Europe which is 29%.
Not that different. Sure, the mode of transportation is different, but not time spent commuting.
Maybe you lived in a bubble in Europe
Also roads still exist in Europe, you know.
Average one way EU commute was 25 minutes in 2019, for Netherlands, it was 27 minutes. [0]
Average one way US commute was 27.6 minutes in 2019. [1]
Sure, there’s a 10% difference, but there are EU states over 30 minutes. The US isn’t that much of an outlier.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/10321620/com...
[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/commuting/guidance/...
I was shocked at how people here, pretty much outright accused me of lying, because I mentioned that the typical commute time, from the area I live (and there are many, many more areas, even farther out) to the city, is measured in hours.
They keep whipping out that census site, and telling me that my eyes and experience are wrong, because Teh Internets Tubes says it's only 27 minutes (to travel 35 miles).
I have to assume that the vast majority of folks here, have never had to deal with a typical (and it is typical) US suburban commute.
If folks want to get a real (as opposed to complete fiction) idea of what a US commute is like, most cites have traffic cams on their arteries.
Not that I ever go into my closer office any longer but that's about a 30 minute drive to an industrial park which is a very typical sort of commute. (I had about the same with another job years ago.)
However, almost everyone that lives around me, works in the city. Many of them take the train. I know several that drive, though. They usually have highly skewed hours (they will drive in at 5AM, and come back at 3, but even then, there's a lot of traffic).
When I lived in the DC suburbs, even the suburban local commutes were crazy. I had a six-mile commute, one town South, and it often took 45 minutes. It would have been faster to bike.
Now, if the choice is office (any) vs remote, I see why offices are so bad.
An open office with 6 people? Likely fine.
Now put 2 of those people on calls all day.
Remove any sound isolation, dividers, drop-ceiling (it looks cool to have the warehouse look with exposed air ducting!), and give them hardwood floors. Is it still pleasant?
Now make it 60 people instead, and make the heavy callers 20 of those.
--
Offices are contextual, I have had offices that are 8 people properly spaced out with a couple of sound baffles in the room and they were described as "open".
I've also been thrown into a room where I was shoulder-to-shoulder with my nearest neighbours in a room that supposedly sat 45 people, with no drop ceiling, no dividers and hardwood floors... which was also described as "open".
Footsteps approaching definitely distract me, 100%, every time, especially if they're distinct footsteps like heels or boots with a solid sole on hard wood.
I don't suffer any known cognitive conditions, perhaps ADHD (but I am not diagnosed).
If it is ADHD then that affects a DIAGNOSED 13% of humanity[0], and far more people are undiagnosed, though we get better every year at diagnosing it. So if I have ADHD and this is the cause then I am far from alone here.
However, in Coffee Shop settings I can tune out the background, I have less anxiety from being disturbed, watched or expected to listen in. So, take from that what you will I guess.
[0]: https://chadd.org/about-adhd/general-prevalence/
In my situation: I suffer some amount of anxiety from being disturbed and because of that I cannot focus, I am always "on edge" waiting for something to happen in any direction of someone trying to get my attention.
I don't flip out. I suffer silently, and I only discuss it in one-on-ones or on forums such as this. Which makes people think that this is not a problem- but it is a problem, because I must focus in order to get my work done.
So instead of doing it in the office, I go home and do my actual work in my "free" time, and in the office I used to mostly procrastinate or do tasks that were urgent or took less than 15 minutes.
Here:
> My gut reaction to your comment* is outrage honestly.
> I cannot focus, I am always "on edge" waiting for something to happen in any direction of someone trying to get my attention.
> I suffer silently, and I only discuss it in one-on-ones or on forums such as this. Which makes people think that this is not a problem- but it is a problem, because I must focus in order to get my work done.
> So instead of doing it in the office, I go home and do my actual work in my "free" time, and in the office I used to mostly procrastinate
> in Coffee Shop settings I can tune out the background
It is a little weird that much of your most explicit discussion of flipping out comes from the same comment where you insist that you don't flip out.
That you don't vocalize your histrionics doesn't mean you're not having them. Throwing an internal fit and refusing to work is flipping out. Feeling outraged that someone might point out that open offices are objectively not bad is flipping out. By the time you've admitted that you have no problem working in a Starbucks, you've also admitted that whatever your problem with your office is, it's not related to the working conditions.
That you can’t empathise is much more telling of your own sociopathy and not an indictment of my existence.
I can be very productive, but I think its obvious to everyone with a brain that if you throw someone (anyone) into an environment where they are constantly on edge then they will not be able to deliver on focused work.
We're not always there at the same time, the three of us. If the weather is inclement or someone needs to care for their child we just don't show. We've got a texting group to let each other know, but not because anyone needs to know but because we chose to keep each other informed.
It all feels very grown up and official, and it's very nice because it's ours. None of us has to ask a pointy haired boss for permission to buy a wine cooler or a new lamp, or whatever, we just do it. Sometimes we'll argue things but it's always chill. Like this week we've been going back and forth about where to place our new HomePod speakers. We just try it till we find a spot.
It helps that we're three dudes who've been friends for a good 20 years at this point. We all like working remotely, but none of us like being cooped up at home all the time.
The cost of the office space is comparable to any other office space, except for the furniture which is decidedly more high end. We're independent contractors so we've each sprung for whatever furniture we wanted to have.
I feel like this is the ultimate compromise, it works super well for us. Not saying it works for everyone, but I could totally see a world in where employees pick whatever works for them, and employers foot the bill for reasonable expenses like the space, but maybe not for the fancy couch, I dunno.
Anyway, my point with sharing this story is that as much as I love our office, I couldn't have my own room. I can't function in a completely private space. I know others can, and I respect that, but I just can't. But open plan doesn't work for me either, there's a point where it becomes too much. I feel like an office with 2-4 people who are respectful with one another is just right for me.
And maybe that's it, maybe not everyone fits the same mold, so maybe the future of a good working space is choose your own adventure? Not that it's without its challenges, it took us some 6 months or so to find the right spot!
Noise canceling headphones are a must. I can hear everything from all around and it's overwhelming at times.
In my prior role I shared a huge office with 2 other people, and later had a large office to myself with a big U shaped desk, small circle table and chairs, a whiteboard, and coworkers right across the hall. It was a great work environment.
it was awesome for years until they decided to triple our rent when our 5 year lease ended. this was in 2016. we transitioned successfully to wfh. i have absolutely no sympathy for the hurting CRE business these days, they dug their own grave through an insane amount of greed brought on by super favorable tax treatments.
i still take naps on my couch though, so that hasn't changed.
I have worked with a couple of high-end design firms that were like this (usually a staff of less than five).
It doesn't scale well, though. I've watched some of these same firms, get too big for their space, and have to go more ... Office Space.
In Portugal from universities, startups and big companies, the computer people always get the open space, with offices reserved for upper management.
Even if you get an office, it is a shared office in a kind of miniture open space.
At very least for the last 40 years.
After that I was still in an open office but it had no hot desking and people didn't take calls at their desk. That was a lot better. After the first one it seemed great.
Then COVID happened and I started working from home and it was amazing. I questioned whether I'd even done any work in the past few years. It was so much better.
Then I got depressed because living in the same four walls day in day out gets to you.
Now my workplace has also reintroduced cubicles and I work mostly from home still but regularly work in the office in a cubicle. This is the bet set up I've had so far. I get enough of a dose of "office" but I'm still able to actually work in the office. I get to do the majority of my "head down" work in peace in a familiar environment with no commute. It's pretty good.
There is no silver bullet.
The most important want is that of the executive who can open the door of his office and gaze out at the sea of reportees and down-levels assigned under him in the corporate org chart. After all, he's the one who decides on office layout and WFH policies.
Best not think too much about what we will call the ones for the test team.
I would definitely prefer to work in an open-office environment vs cubicles. I also don't want an office, because I don't even want to go to work regularly anymore.
The best option for me would be: (i) go to work 2-3 times a week to get out of the house (ii) hot desk open office layout with (iii) lots of meeting rooms.
That's fine as long as you understand that for certain types of people and/or certain types of work - open plan can be a disaster. This discussion has been bouncing back and forth for decades.
Personally speaking my coding productivity drops something like 80% in an open plan office.
I guess they are round now, maybe that was the one missing ingredient that means we will be on cubicles forever and everyone will finally understand why they are better?
So, he doesn't really have any personal experience to comment on what works or doesn't work at a large software company like Meta, the same way a SWE at Meta doesn't have any personal experience to comment on what works or doesn't work for a Professor at Georgetown University. Also, to be more specific, he's a Professor of Comp.Sci., not Professor of Psychology or Professor of Workplace Layout Optimization..
I read 2-3 of his books and concluded that he doesn't know what he's talking about. His books are 10 page blog posts tortured to be 300 page books.
The only takeaway I got was that Deep Work is a bullshit term for having focus.
1. I had already been blocking out "no meeting" time of 2-4 hours a day to get work done, but during this time I would listen to music and sometimes check slack. The book got me to use focus mode on my Mac and phone, set a "heads down until [time x]" away message on Slack and work without music or any other distractions ON ONE HARD PROBLEM. My effectiveness skyrocketed and I was happier at work (the only downside was that I wanted to work more).
2. When dealing with a hard problem, taking a break, taking a walk and thinking through the problem using the framework he mentioned in the book, have used this method to solve multiple hard problems.
3. Forced me systematize how I end my work day and what time I end it (unless there's an emergency)
I am much more saner, calmer, and get more done because I adopted Deep Work philosophy in my life.
I would highly advise reading the book and judging for yourselves (for the people reading the above comment).
Because if this is a theoretical problem, with clear definitions, parameters, boundary conditions and objectives, which has already been solved, so that non-experts [such as CN] can just look up the solution, then I'd also like to see this!
Your second paragraph is a total strawman.
Look to the straw man in your own eye.
If you cannot mathematically define all the variables and boundary conditions, it is not a theoretical problem.
Branches of science concerned human behaviour dont have theoretical problems.
But I agree, many authors just pick a topic and run with it. Not having experience doesn't stop them.
Which ties into my last remark- even the largest building at Meta isn’t an 8 acre field of open offices. There are tons of conference rooms, cafes, 1-2 person rooms, open spaces and other rooms to break up the space and provide opportunities for collaboration. It’s not as nice as a private office but better then some other companies I’ve seen post-Covid, where they’ve minimized their footprint to the extent that you can’t find an open desk or conference room when another team is having an on-site.
I’m not sure whether this is an intentional misrepresentation of facts or just a complete lack of fact-checking but I was pretty disappointed in this article.
I hope that this is the first step on the road to allowing more people to have a private office. This seems to be a temporary fix to work within the constraints of buildings that were designed to be open offices.
My solution to this was to listen to "brown noise" on my over-ear headphones while I was in there trying to work. Then I remembered my ancient Gear Iconx Samsung bluetooth earbuds had built-in storage. I loaded a 20 loop of brown noise in there so I don't have to tether it to my phone all the time and I started using that.
It really does make a difference in terms of focusing and getting things done. Even random mumblings from my office mates, hallways conversations etc. don't distract me.
Sometimes treating the symptoms is the right move, but oftentimes it is not. Local maxima.
I'm working on it.
Discussion about it from a few months back, from a NYT article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32998960
I'm not worried.
If you need to do actual work, an office is the best. If you're doing BAU 9-6 clockwatching type job with no real deliverables, the social aspects of an open plan office make this torture a little more tolerable for most people.
Cubicles were great, especially if you got one near a window. You had the outside view; desks were angular in large cubicles so you had ample space for multiple monitors; the barriers provided just enough visual and noise isolation, while you could always prop up and chat with your neighbors; the barriers also served as tackboards, and people decorated their spaces in unique ways. Et cetera.
I still don't want to go back to working in an office, even if I had a personal space with a door, which most companies can't afford, but they should bring back the cubicle. It will probably be renamed and marketed as something else, but kudos to Meta for taking the lead.
edit: some manga kissa are designed for people to watch porn, obviously those don't have windows.
The solution is not cubicles, or even closed offices. Just open offices with ~1/3 of the regular density of people per square metre would be good. It also gets you the promised "seamless collaboration" of open offices.
Smaller companies follow these trends because they think it will make them successful. It's like reading the latest article on "Ten morning routines of billionaires", following that, and believing that it will make you rich. It's the other way around.
I've been thinking that reverse engineering skills are much more useful than puzzle solving.
I had such a question at Google. I guessed what was the problem they were trying to solve as it was a classic leetcode question (linking nodes in a tree while traversing it). So while the format is a bit different than typical leetcode solving, I'd say it's still the same type of skills and preparation involved (at least in my case).
Also, the bit about puzzles, leetcode is somewhat of a myth, mostly perpetuated by salty candidates who couldn't pass tech interview loops, for whatever reason. Puzzles were explicitly banned at Meta and Google, when I worked there, and if a question is found on leetcode or a similar site (as they eventually do), they'd get banned too. The idea isn't to make candidates jump through a series of pointless hoops, but to concretely evaluate their coding and reasoning abilities. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a lot more BS proof that just having a chat or take home assignments. Also, needless to say, more senior candidates are expected to successfully grapple with harder problems.
Why?
At any rate, there's a chance the accusation was wrong, and if you make wrong accusations and the other person disputes it, it could lead to unnecessary legal proceedings. (libel, etc.)
PS: not saying the company policy by the GP is necessarily correct, just saying what lawyers and risk adverse bureaucrats might be thinking when they drafted it.
I have never worked in one so I am only imagining here, but I think I would prefer either of the two other options to cubicles.
I have worked in both, and an open plan is vastly noisier and more distracting than a cubicle.
It was a great setup as you’d build nice team dynamics and easily talk, but didn’t need assistive technology like headphones and white noise machines to function.
15 years later, I’m probably skill in regular contact with about 50% of the people I worked with in that environment.
I am interested to see how work habits change and evolve. For me personally mostly working from home and then heading in to something of an open office with conference rooms is ideal because on the in-office day the only reason for me to be there is peer collaboration anyway so I wouldn’t need an office.
For a lot of companies at this point, having dedicated individual work spaces for most employees doesn't make a lot of sense unless they have specific equipment needs and are going to come in most days.
Closed doors are like therapist room - you get to the meaning of topics fast. They allow conflict resolution and discussion.
Open concept are like libraries, everyone is silently trying to to disturb each other working. Full of visual and audible distractions.
WFH remote meeting have the lowest form of communication bandwidth. It's hard to arbitrage interactions with no visual cues, invites multi-tasking during meetings, and encourages disengagement.
So, like, if you Zoom'ed?
Which, unless the meeting is about hanky panky or massage or something, should be just as good for the purposes of technical discussion...
Can your manager just disrupt you and micromanage you in person at all times at home?
Does it even justify their role in the company when noone can see his subordinates all together in the same space?
The principle behind cubicles is to reduce the amount of open space immediately around you, with sound-absorbing material so both the sound you emit, and the sound others emit, travel more upwards than side-ways as the cubicle walls force the sound up, essentially making the environment more silent, if you are situated in a cubicle. If you were to be hanging from the roof above all cubicles, you'd get to hear basically all the sounds coming from the cubicles.
It's a pretty basic solution, something better would be actual private offices where everyone is enclosed fully, then you can make the environment really quiet. But that's also way more expensive and requires more space.
I'm not sure that's the case. Most companies lease their floors space. The offices themselves are built to a standard height or code, so the actual walls needed for internal offices are easy to procure, and manufactured en-masse.
Sure, there's a sunk cost to it, but once you're past start up size, your company is probably wasting more money on many other things (entertainment, lunch, free merch, and so on) than a one-off floor reconfiguration to accommodate offices.
At the other extreme, I worked for Megabank. They had a couple of buildings, with a total floor count of around 70, in the basement they had not hundreds, but thousands of partition walls stacked up and ready for use, so they could reconfigure the offices as needed. But, of course, only for senior management. Everyone else had to work in open plan offices.
A typical 'cubicle' has a wide desk and space to move you chair in and out of, plus a 'corridor' between all the cubicles. Change cubicle walls to office walls and have doors open into the existing corridor, and it's no different in size. Building codes might require some changes but I don't think it will anywhere near as much as 2x.
The literature (Spolsky lists it one of his articles) implies that increased productivity of the existing employees in their own offices more than compensates for the slight decrease in the number of people you can pack into a fixed area.
The difference with start-ups vs non-start-ups, is that in that first 6-12 months, it is typically a small group of people completely focused on getting the business up and running, and writing greenfield code. My point is that the environment, both the physical open plan office, and the 'coding environment' are totally different it's quite dynamic for start ups where it's just getting new code up and running and iterating quickly on ideas, vs. much more 'static' when the company has an existing product and code base.
I think they promote collaboration, but the price oh the price of that can so often be way higher than the value.
A company that cannot afford proper offices is probably not creating much value. Big tech companies can afford offices. They choose to allocate capital differently.
When I ran a consultancy, I spent a lot of rent of making sure my employees had both proper offices where they could think and common areas where they could collaborate. Doing otherwise is foolish.
Looking back, wouldn't it have made more sense to not spend alot on rent and let the employees work at home? Granted, no common areas to collaborate.
Also working from home is not as productive.
I'd like to see your data on that. When covid hit and sent everyone home I was working in the Danish public sector and we saw an increase in productivity. People worked less hours, or at least, they were using their computers for less hours, but they delivered more.
It probably would've lead to reforms if it wasn't because the employee satisfaction didn't do equally well. As you might imagine, covid was hard on middle managers, but it also turned out that quite a lot of employees (public sector might be very different than tech) got very lonely while working from home every day.
There’s your answer, demoralized employees are unproductive.
What can be much more manageable is to have comfortable cubicles for everyone (not the cramped desks with dividers, which is what probably gave cubicles the bad rep), and also have many small and large meeting rooms where people can congregate and collaborate in. This has the benefit of defaulting to semi-private workspaces which can easily scale, and moves the noisy collaborative areas to closed rooms, so that they don't bother anyone else. The smaller rooms could even serve as rotating private offices, if needed, that anyone can book for a limited period of time.
But the open floor office only has practical drawbacks, and definitely has to go. It only got popular because it's really the cheapest option for companies; just place some desks, chairs and monitors in a huge space, and sell it as "collaborative". But if they really want to entice people to come back to the office, they need to invest in better working conditions.
Some companies like Microsoft routinely provided them
Go visit any good law firm or CPA firm.
I benefit from my equity holdings in tech companies. They are choosing to give that money to me in valuation instead of building out proper offices.
Do these companies hire thousands of employees a year? I doubt that.
Private offices for everyone just doesn't scale at the same growth rate of tech companies. Where would they realistically fit thousands of new employees per year if everyone had their own office?
> I benefit from my equity holdings in tech companies. They are choosing to give that money to me in valuation instead of building out proper offices.
And you expect the buildings to just magically expand for new employees? I'd rather not take a pay cut, and "settle" for comfortable cubicles. Or better yet, work remotely, and get a raise from the money the company is saving on not having to pay for my office space.
One approach is for an organization to use open offices while they are building out proper offices.
They have significant churn.
That said, when I worked at one, I didn’t have an office. I didn’t even have a dedicated desk.
Wasn't a problem for Microsoft and other companies. But then again, those valued their employees...
I recommend that all those who might compete with me adopt these situations and give up on the difficulties of managing office space.
It was designed by Frank Gehry and built by Gensler for a client that had an open pocket book. You'd be surprised at how much a pane of glass can cost when it's glass that has to go into a Frank Gehry building.
Not saying it's just offices that saw the... Sun-set... but there are things companies that survive do -- and private offices ain't common.
What on Earth is wrong with traditional offices with normal doors? Cubicles always make me think of cattle, they are like open space but you have limited view so someone can stalk you without you noticing that or surprise you etc. Thank goodness we can easily work remotely these days.
I can explain this in three words:
* money * money * money
Open-plan is much cheaper.
I agree. It's like how cells with bars on three sides and a window on the wall side, are so much better than isolation cells closed all over.
Meta packed lots of people into small spaces where everyone has crappy for audio phones in an industrial look with concrete floors. It was worse than a trading floor imho
This, why are knowledge-based companies so bad at designing work for the brain’s best capabilities?
Rather, every single study has asserted that it decreases communication.
Yet, it's clung to.
Which is why I think it's purely a cost saving (or flexibility?) move.
Office managers must love not having to care about how teams are sized? Only thing I can think of.
In an open space, you can have sound walls, pods that people can use for calls, add meeting rooms, isolate noisy places like the kitchen, etc.